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Comment by hi_hi | Hacker News Reader

There's a whole host of these, which is great, thats been listed recently at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39262314

This one's mine https://listofdisks.com/ :-)

The faceted search approach can be applied to so many things, and it's pretty easy to code up.

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Thanks for building this. As someone who got bit by this, could you please add a column for SMR vs CMR? Thanks again!

I had to check what that was. I'd love to add it, along with any other useful metrics that people would find useful, but I'd be surprised if that detail was available in the provided Amazon info (web page).

I’m sure these are trade secrets, but how do these sites get all the data? Is it just scraping?

https://webservices.amazon.com/paapi5/documentation/#overvie...

No trade secret here, it is indeed simple web scraping.

Although as noted, Amazon does provide a product API, if you qualify with 3 sales, which I did, and was then promptly ejected from the affiliates program by Amazon. I'm honestly not sure I'd want to build my product on top of their API as they then have you by the short and curlies.

I'd be interested to see how all these other "copy cat" sites fare with the Amazon policies?

I guess we’ll see. I took the scraping route, for both reasons - didn’t have the 3 sales to qualify, and I don’t like the idea of coming cap-in-hand to Amazon for access to their API. Easier to just scrape what I need.

BUT we’ll see what happens when/if I try to get a few bucks back from the affiliate links ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Wait. So you weren't ejected until you tried to use the API? Were you earning anything from your affiliate links prior to getting access to the API?

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